ISTANBUL— Just when I had decided that biennials were too overblown in scale to comprehend, too filled with the usual suspects to surprise, and too centered on entertainment and cultural tourism to warrant the trip, the 11th Istanbul Biennial proved me wrong. Here was a moderately sized, international exhibition that addresses a spectrum of difficult political and economic realities while activating the imagination, bringing together the work of 73 artists and collaborative groups whose names are, for the most part, unfamiliar on the biennial circuit. Curated by the Zagreb-based collective What, How & for Whom (WHW) (read an interview with the collective's Ivet Ćurlin here), this year’s Istanbul Biennial, on view through Nov. 8, is thoroughly researched and geographically focused, with a majority of the artists coming from Eastern Europe or the Middle East. Thematic without being insular, the exhibition responds to the question asked by its title — "What Keeps Mankind Alive?" — by providing as many answers as artworks on view. It’s a question borrowed from a song in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, one whose formulation and urgency seem to have genuinely interested the curators as they assembled a variety of regionally oriented perspectives that cuts across several generations of artistic practice. If WHW’s invocation of Brecht and their desire to reconsider the relationship between art and politics seems unfashionably utopian, the resulting exhibition suggests that being fashionable is not only beside the point, it’s a luxury we simply can’t afford.

To kick off the Biennial’s preview, Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué took the stage inside the hushed, darkened opulence of Istanbul’s Emek Cinema — one of the city’s great movie palaces of 1920s — and delivered his lecture-performance The Inhabitants of Images. Given WHW’s interest in Brecht, it is not surprising that they chose a piece of experimental, politically engaged theater to launch the show. What is striking, in retrospect, is how Mroué’s monologue, a series of surgically precise readings of politically charged images originally seen on the streets of Beirut — touched on many of the exhibition’s overarching themes and provided interpretative strategies for the works on view. It was as if, while watching Mroué dissect the photographs in his presentation, viewers were receiving instruction in the art of looking critically; we were being reminded that images are often a medium through which power is asserted and collective memory is written, erased, and contested — all concerns that pulsed throughout the Biennial’s three venues. Like a bit of sand slowly gathering mother-of-pearl, Mroué’s performance stayed with me as I visited the exhibition during the days that followed.

Unearthing Idealism
On view in the main exhibition site, just next to the Istanbul Modern, are various utopias — born of nostalgia for times long gone, hopeful visions of the future, and state-issued fantasies that collapse under scrutiny. Croatian artist David Maljković excavates Eastern Europe’s creative and political history, contrasting unearthed optimism and progressive politics with the bleak reality of the present. His series “After the Fair” (2009) overlays the ghostly outline of the now-forgotten Yugoslavian Pavilion at the 1949 International Vienna Fair — designed by members of the socially engaged artists’ collective EXAT 51 — onto stark black-and-white photographs of a Zagreb flea market. Maljković’s effort to recuperate the lost cultural legacy of the socialist Eastern Bloc in the face of public amnesia is a project taken up by several artists in the Biennial, and is the focal point of several of WHW’s prior curatorial projects.

Ramallah-based artist Wafa Hourani’s installation Qalandia 2087 (2009), the third in a series of related works, presents a model of one of the largest Palestinian military checkpoints and refuge camps on the West Bank as it might look in the year 2087. A dense network of detailed maquettes, Hourani’s miniature Qalandia imagines how residents will customize and inhabit the space after the occupation ends.